Passing Time
Chicago Art Book Fair thrilled to present Passing Time
A question beckons, what are the times that we’re in?: the state of artists book publishing, the natural world, the measure of sound, the markers of histories. Time at this moment seems as urgent or cynical as ever for could we have all the time or no time at all? This year we’re asking how you take your time, keep its tempo, note, mark, bend, bind it?
The Chicago Art Book Fair is an international showcase of arts publishers, independent book presses, comic artists, zinemakers, printmakers, and more. Chicago Art Book Fair has served as an affordable, accessible means to access emerging art book techniques within the publishing space.
As the arts become increasingly targeted, The Chicago Art Book Fair provides a space for creators to form communities around their various practices. We support artists who are creating boundary-pushing printed media and provide a platform to feature their work to audiences in one of the country’s major cities, here in Chicago.
This year's Chicago Art Book Fair will be held November 13 - 15th 2026. Thanks to community sponsors, CABF is thrilled to provide 3 FREE booths for students who are currently enrolled in programs, 3 FREE booths for Publishers that are run by BIPOC members.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Chicago Art Book Fair takes place on the land of the Anishinaabe, or the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Many other Nations consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo and Mascouten. We acknowledge all Native peoples who came before us and who continue to contribute to this day.
CONTACT US
Email: chicagoabf@gmail.com
Social: @chicago_art_book_fair
Identity and web design by D. Josh Cook and Oscar Solis
Program
Little Palestine Project: Objects of Memory
Jason Reblando: This Is Captured Paper
Cecil McDonald, Jr.: The Heat of the Cool
riso & rhythm: zine making workshop
B. Ingrid Olson: Cast of Mind
New Orthographies: zine workshop
Rebecca Shore: Exhibition Catalogs
keepsake. : leaf printing workshop
Impresiones de Lucha: collective learning and printmaking workshop
Little Palestine Project: Objects of Memory
The Little Palestine Project is excited to announce its inaugural lecture, Little Palestine Project: Objects of Memory. Located in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, Little Palestine is home to one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States. The Little Palestine Project is an object-based oral history initiative dedicated to documenting and preserving the histories of Arab immigrants who have settled in the area and established a vibrant community. The lecture will trace the history of the region and its interconnectedness with the social, political, and cultural fabric of the city of Chicago.
The Little Palestine Project: Vol. 1 Zine is a 60-page bilingual zine featuring excerpts from interviews from the first year of The Little Palestine Project. Available for purchase in the Learning Lab, located on the 1st floor at the Washington entrance.
Dorrah Alharbi is a curator and community archivist whose work examines the politics of memory in modern and contemporary art from West Asia, with particular attention to artistic experimentation of Arab artists in the diaspora. In 2024, Alharbi founded and continues to direct the Little Palestine Project, a digital archival initiative preserving and documenting oral histories of Arab immigrant communities in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. The Little Palestine Project has been featured in the Chicago Reader and Arab News.
Instagram: @littlepalestineproject
Jason Reblando: This Is Captured Paper
This Is Captured Paper by Jason Reblando. “In This Is Captured Paper, I create photocollages based upon U.S. colonial photography made in the Philippines. By physically cutting, pasting, and rearranging elements of the images, I aim to deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze, while attempting to reclaim the photographic narrative. I hope that by layering and reshaping images upon images, the cumulative effect interrupts the reading of the original photograph. In some collages, the cut patterns reference textile-makers across the Philippine archipelago, while in other collages, shapes and silhouettes allude to a problematic colonial past. By weaving historical photographs into my own contemporary art practice, I interrogate the lasting influence of imagery that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines.”
Jason Reblando is an artist and photographer based in Normal, Illinois. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Sociology from Boston College. He is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, two Artist Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Politico, Camera Austria, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Marketplace, MAS Context, Real Simple, Places Journal, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader. His photographs are collected in the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections, and the University of Louisville Special Collections. His book New Deal Utopias was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2017. He recently served on the Society for Photographic Education Board of Directors (2022–2026) and is an Associate Professor of Photography in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
Cecil McDonald, Jr.: The Heat of the Cool
The Heat of the Cool by Cecil McDonald, Jr. “The Heat of the Cool emerged from a theory that espouses the idea that cool or coolness is a West African phenomenon where its inhabitants mask a deep wellspring of intensity, stress, or pleasure with serenity, calmness, or spirituality. Believing in the transformative power of dance I create parties, dances, and occurrences of movement, where participants (dancers) and collaborators (DJs, still and motion photographers) converge. From these events, I create large-scale photographs and time-based imagery that renders the moving, dancing body as a symbol of freedom, with the ability to express the ownership of one’s time, space, labor, and self.”
Cecil McDonald, Jr.: “I am most interested in the intersections of masculinity, familial relations, and the artistic and intellectual pursuits of black culture, particularly as this culture intersects with and informs the larger culture. Through photography, video, and dance/performance, I seek to investigate and question the norms and customs that govern our understanding of each other, our families, and the myriad of societal struggles and triumphs. I studied fashion, house music and dance club culture before receiving an MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I currently serve as an adjunct professor and a teaching artist at the Center for Community Arts Partnership at Columbia College Chicago. My work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with works in the permanent collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago Bank of America LaSalle Collection, and Museum of Contemporary Photography. I was awarded the Joyce Foundation Midwest Voices & Visions Award, the Artadia Award, The Swiss Benevolent Society, Lucerne, Switzerland Residency and the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award. I participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in July 2013. In 2016 the first edition of my monograph In The Company of Black was published and was shortlisted by the Aperture Foundation for the 2017 First PhotoBook Award.”
riso & rhythm: zine making workshop
“The sounds which create joy – whether it be jazz, house or any other ‘riddim’ – are the carriers of stories and memories.”
Join our riso printing workshop! Under guidance, we will create a collective zine in which each participant contributes their personal story. Drawing from a wide range of Black sonic traditions, the zine will explore music and collective memory.
For this workshop, please collect images from your personal archive, such as family photos, CDs, record sleeves or other printed matter, and bring them with you. Your collections will form the source material for the collective zine.
Norman will guide the sonic meditation while Mirelle (Roots to Fruits) leads participants in translating the rhythms and stories to (riso)print.
Mirelle van Tulder is an artist, designer and researcher. In 2019 she founded Roots to Fruits, an independent publishing house and seasonal magazine dedicated to exploring decolonial sounds.
Norman Hernandez is a DJ currently based in Chicago, Illinois. As a resident on NTS Radio, they explore the relationship between poetics, improvisation and Black sonic expression.
RSVP is encouraged (limited to 15 participants): reserve a spot
Instagram: @errrantry, @rootstofruits.info
Web: rootstofruits.info
B. Ingrid Olson: Cast of Mind
Cast of Mind extends B. Ingrid Olson’s year-long exhibition at i8 Grandi in Reykjavik, where the Chicago-based artist continuously reconfigured the installation in ten successive iterations. Taking this process as a guiding structure, the model of artistic practice as an evolving form is brought into book form and, in Olson’s words, “the attempt to form a hard copy out of something as slippery as a thought process.” The 380-page sequence is an exhibition in and of itself, evidencing Olson’s thought processes as the artworks and their arrangement in space repeat or change, building to a crescendo of simultaneous continuity and dislocation. Newly commissioned writing, along with excerpts from existing texts, is interleaved between images from the original exhibition’s distinct permutations. Playing in time, with continuous, adjusted variations, relations, and encounters, this book casts an exhibition and a thought process that refuses to sit still, ever-changing and ongoing.
In her omnidimensional work, the Chicago-based artist B. Ingrid Olson (born 1987, Denver) engages the reciprocities between photography, sculpture, and architecture. Poetically testing the capacities of the human body in relation to architectural conditions, she calls attention to the ways that gender and power are implicated in the physical and psychological structuring of space.
Olson’s work is represented in numerous public collections, and has been featured in solo exhibitions internationally, most recently at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; fluent, Santander, Spain; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Secession in Vienna. She participated in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Making books has been a touchstone for her practice, beginning with unique artist’s books and more recently including museum catalogues such as History Mother Little Sister (2023) and 323 (2022).
New Orthographies: zine workshop
Join Lydia Cheshewalla in New Orthographies. Participants will learn different ways to give visual form to hidden and forgotten languages, creating zines that act as pocket dictionaries.
For this workshop, participants are asked to bring images and objects from their personal collections. Consider objects or images that elicit a personal response that is hard to put into words, that have become sacred to you, that deserve memorial, or with which you want a deeper relationship.
Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, the Center for Native Futures, Elmhurst Art Museum, Brushwood Center, and the National Public Housing Museum (Chicago, IL), among others. She is currently filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks and is often found standing in fields.
RSVP is encouraged: reserve a spot
Instagram: @goodwithcoffee
Rebecca Shore: Exhibition Catalogs
Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to offer a book signing with Rebecca Shore, whose exhibition catalogs, produced on the occasions of her first four shows with the gallery, reflect her ongoing exploration of pattern, form, and system. Titles include Rebecca Shore (2017), Barely Committed to Three Dimensions (2015), All in One (2012), and AEiOU (and sometimes why) (2009).
Rebecca Shore (b. 1956, Vermont) has been cultivating a personal body of work in Chicago since graduating from the School of the Art Institute in the early 1980s, drawing inspiration from a rich variety of intellectual and aesthetic sources. Her meticulous paintings and drawings have always been characterized by an abiding interest in pattern and system (she’s the daughter of a scientist) and issues of signification. Given her sensitivity to materials and background in quilting, her work can also be understood in the context of Chicago’s rich fiber arts tradition. Shore was also profoundly influenced by Chicago Imagism, whose artists were her teachers and friends. Look carefully at one of her seemingly cool, immaculate paintings and you’ll often find a layer of wry, even punning, humor.
keepsake. : leaf printing workshop
SUBlvl will be guiding participants through different print processes to document plant life and the seasonal changes of our native flora.
SUBlvl is a Chicago-based experiential creative collective dedicated to artistic activations and programming that amplifies underrepresented and marginalized creatives across the diaspora. Through a multidisciplinary approach spanning visual art, performance, music, and immersive installations, SUBlvl creates dynamic spaces for artistic expression, collaboration, and community engagement.
RSVP is encouraged: reserve a spot
Instagram: @sublvl.co
Impresiones de Lucha: collective learning and printmaking workshop
Join Alma de Izote and friends to learn together about the historical and current struggles in El Salvador through the role of popular education, music, and liberation theology.
Help us turn the Learning Lab into a DIY risograph print shop for agitational art which uplifts voices calling for human rights, supporting land and water defenders, and movements for the freedom of political prisoners. The workshop is suitable for everyone, young and old, no matter your level of knowledge or familiarity with the subject matter, and will be accessible for both Spanish and English speakers.
Alma de Izote is a multi-generational collective of Salvadorans and their allies in Chicago committed to the struggles of leftist popular and social movements in El Salvador.
RSVP is encouraged: reserve a spot
Instagram: @almadeizote
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FAIR DATE & VENUE
Dates & Hours:
November 13, 2026 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
November 14, 2026 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
November 15, 2026 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Venue: Chicago Cultural Center
78 E Washington St, Chicago, IL 60602
Email: chicagoabf@gmail.com
Social: @chicago_art_book_fair
The Chicago Art Book Fair is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
